Donovan
Most commonly referred to simply as Donovan, is a Scottish singer, songwriter, and guitarist.
Way down below the ocean where I wanna be she may be.
You've got to pick up every stitch.
Mmm... must be the season of the witch,
Must be the season of the witch.
When rain has hung the leaves with tears
I want you near to kill my fears,
To help me to leave all my blues behind.
Histories of ages past
Unenlightened shadows cast.
Down through all eternity
The crying of humanity.
'Tis then when the Hurdy Gurdy Man
Comes singing songs of love...
The most important of my achievements, if you want to call them that, was that I successfully introduced mystical ideas into pop culture, which was my obsession and my compulsion when I was 16 years old. So, behind all of this fame and fortune, there was a seeker, on a spiritual path a young man who wanted to discover and share with others an alternative way of looking at the world. I wanted to save our culture from the stupidity and the bigotry and the ignorance that threatened it. And there was the Buddhist way, and the Celtic way.
It seemed in 1968 the possibilities of peace and brotherhood could be realised that very year. We're still working on it.
When I look out my window,
Many sights to see.
And when I look in my window,
So many different people to be...
We are magic. It is magic that we're walking around. It's fantastic magic. Some people would call it miracles; I like to call it magic.
Yes, I'm very aware of this. Yes, the more aware I get, the more I can understand how big it is, how big it will get. It'll be harder to comprehend; that's why I have to go along with it, 'cause its so vast. To say to somebody that God is everything that lives and ever has lived and ever will live, and you're never going to touch and see, smell and be everything that is God. Magic is very hard to comprehend.
When I was 14 or 15 I wanted to be a protest singer like Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie. My father was a socialist and worked with the unions. I thought change was to change the government and to change from one system, capitalism, to socialism and to make the poor of the world happy. But when I opened the book The Way of Zen by Alan Watts and I opened up the Diamond Sutra, and Lao Tsus Tao Te Ching, I realized that the problem of suffering was much deeper than governments and social problems. The problems were very deep. They were nothing short of changing the way we look at reality. Therefore I became a teacher, or a reflection of the teachings. Phil Ochs, the great protest singer, said I had given up protest, and Joan Baez said to Bob Dylan, Hes given up protest. But what I had given up was looking for the answer in social change. The change was to be a spiritual change. The suffering was coming from an erroneous view of reality...